


nexus

by brella



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Character Study, Developing Relationship, Getting Together, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, References to Depression, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21648961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: From Galo, there had been a box wrapped sloppily in brown paper, and a card with it. Inside the box was a space heater and inside the card were the words,To keep you warm when I can’t! GT ☆, which Lio had read countless times, unable to decipher their meaning.Lio learns to listen to new voices.
Relationships: Aina Ardebit & Lio Fotia, Lio Fotia & Gueira & Meis, Lio Fotia & Promare, Lio Fotia/Galo Thymos
Comments: 24
Kudos: 208
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	nexus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Slumber](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slumber/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Slumber! Your letter was so much fun to work with. I had a lot of thoughts about _Promare_ after I saw it and you seemed to be interested in the same questions, so I hope that the answers I'm pushing around in the sandbox align with what you wanted.
> 
> I think that [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFM5iFC4B5g) is a good song for this fic. But maybe that is personal bias speaking.
> 
> A thing to note is that I have only seen the movie, and not the OVAs. If I got anything wrong—that is probably why!

_though you can't see the sun,_  
_a new day has begun_

— Hiroyuki Sawano, “Inferno”

* * *

In the desert, Lio is nine and riding his mother’s motorcycle alone through the sagebrush steppe when a voice behind his lungs says his name. 

It’s a small voice, and were it not inside of him Lio most likely wouldn’t have heard it. The roar of the engine and the gathering of the storm beyond the plateau would have swallowed it whole. He swerves the bike in shock and skids for a moment against the shrubs, sending sage-and-dust-smell erupting into the long dusk, before he steadies it again, gripping the handlebars until the pressure reaches the bone. 

“Who are you?” he whispers, because it feels like the right question. 

And the voice answers with a name, in a strange, flickering language, sending heat out to his fingers like a sun flare. Lio could not speak that name, but he knows it. He knows it so well that the knowing scorches his heart. 

_I am yours_ , it says, phosphorescent. _I am you. I am yours. I do not go out._

* * *

There are fourteen parks in Promepolis—parks with fountains, and ginkgo trees, and hydrangea bushes, and benches for sitting. Though he had memorized the city plans a dozen times over, first the pipes and power lines and then all the rest, this was something that Lio had not known until he lived there. 

Mad Burnish would have had no need for parks, so it doesn’t surprise him. As a city, Promepolis was and is already plenty complicated, and back then they had dealt only in demolished things anyway, at least for a time: abandoned parking garages, hollowed-out office buildings, dead-end streets; fragmented blocks of civilization that Kray Foresight had used up and left to die. 

His apartment is downtown, and bigger than he knows what to do with. Within hours of his signing the lease, the crew at the FDPP had laden him with furnishings both pragmatic and utterly useless: a horrendous yellow couch from Remi, a tall mirror from Aina, a set of assorted neon training weights from Varys, a Venus flytrap in a Hello Kitty pot from Lucia, a brand new microwave from Ignis. 

From Galo, there had been a box wrapped sloppily in brown paper, and a card with it. Inside the box was a space heater and inside the card were the words, _To keep you warm when I can’t! GT_ _☆_ , which Lio had read countless times, unable to decipher their meaning. 

Burning Rescue had given him many things, in that long and shapeless week since the Promare had swallowed the Earth for an instant, and the apartment is only the first. Within a month Ignis has offered him a job. 

“They cut Freeze Force’s funding,” he says, and outside the window of his office Lio can see people passing, and the trees turning red, “so we get the rest. Got an opening with your name on it, if you’ll have it. Think about it.”

Lio does think about it. And, as fall retreats into winter, keeps thinking.

One of the fourteen parks is near the FDPP, about ten minutes on foot. Lio memorizes the short route: a right out of the building, another right at the toothpaste advertisement, a left, a right onto a set of stairs, and then the park, hidden among a cluster of apartment complexes. It’s big and green and has a pond, and a particular white stone bench that Lio likes, and a thriving population of waterfowl. 

He’s on his bench today with his hands stuffed into his armpits, shivering in the midwinter cold, which seems to scrape the skin off of him when the wind blows through. Since it’s a work day, there aren’t many other people around; Lio listens only to the conversing ducks and the stiff bare branches of the trees, bracing themselves against the season. 

“Watchin’ the ducks, buddy?” 

Lio looks up sharply, poised to leap off of the bench. At the sight of Galo, cheerful and expectant in a garish red tracksuit beside him, he relaxes, releases himself. Galo’s face is glistening, and his broad chest rises and falls visibly, like he’d jogged here.

Lio’s eyes stray back to the pond, where two mallards are ambling over the still surface. Minutely, he shakes his head. At Galo’s questioning look, he lifts his arm and points to the other side of the pond, under a maple, where a white swan bobs serenely in place. 

“It’s the only one,” he says, and then considers something. “Don’t call me buddy, I’m not your buddy.” 

These things never sting Galo, not even slightly. He lets out a short laugh. 

“Okay,” he says, and for a second his voice grows tender. “Watchin’ the ducks… Lio?” 

Lio never knows what he’s supposed to do when Galo says his name like that, or when Galo’s face looks like that in profile, from below. He settles for sinking back against the bench with an exasperated sigh, and answering with nothing. 

“You come out here a lot?” Galo asks conversationally after a moment. 

Lio nods. “It’s quiet.” He tilts his head down. “No one bothers me.” Then a smile, unexpected. “Except for you.” 

Galo hisses through his teeth, setting a hand behind his head. “Ouch! Well, you looked like you could use some botherin’, that’s all. Can I sit?” he asks, and sits. “Damn, it’s cold. Heat’s out at HQ, so I decided to go for a run. Keep the blood flowin’.” 

Galo’s runs tend to be in the five to ten mile range. Lio has to suppress a shudder. 

“Did it work?” he asks, bone-dry.

“Mm!” Galo thumps a fist against his chest, beaming proudly, like a star. “Between that and my burning firefighter's soul, winter’s got nothin’ on me!”

“Of course.” 

“How’s the new place?” Galo asks, bending forward to stretch toward his toes with a grunt. “You all moved in?”

Lio rubs his hands together, his fingertips stiff and pink and wind-bitten. He considers the question, which is yet another that he isn’t sure how to answer. It would feel strange to tell Galo that he’s lived an inextricable fraction of his life in caves and deadfalls and the ruins of parking lots, and that these places wouldn’t have had outlets for a space heater. 

“More or less,” he says, which feels better than admitting that all of his things are still cluttered together in the corner by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Except for the space heater. 

“I gotta come by sometime,” Galo says. “See what you’ve done with the place!” 

Lio isn’t sure he wants Galo to see his thing-pile, but he can’t find it in himself to turn him down. 

“How did you find me, anyway?” he asks, watching his breath stream into a hazy cloud and vanish—the only heat left in him, now; the frail heat of life. 

“Oh, Aina said there was a park you liked,” Galo replies, now doing lunges, “but she couldn’t remember which one. So I just went to every park I could think of till I found this one. Only took me like… an hour.” 

Lio turns to him, open-mouthed. Galo straightens up, huffing out a satisfied breath and bracing his hands on his hips. He breathes in deep through his nose, and then blows it out. 

In Lio’s stumbling search for the right word, he lands on, “Idiot.” 

Galo blinks down at him for a second before he goes slack-jawed. “Wh-Who’s an idiot?!” 

“You are,” Lio says, and stands. He slips his hands into the pocket of his coat and tries to glare judgmentally up at Galo—who, he is surprised anew to discover, towers over him—but his face doesn’t feel like it assembles the correct expression. “First-class. I’m going home.” 

Galo sticks out his lower lip, which makes putting the glare together even more impossible. 

“You wanna grab pizza or something first?” he asks, jogging to keep up with Lio when he starts to stride along the pond’s edge back to the park entrance. “My treat! I’m not on duty again till Wednesday!” 

Lio stops in his tracks and flounders, pivoting slowly back around to see Galo affixing him with an earnest, hopeful stare, his cheeks still flushed, his body still breathing, breathing. 

“Noodles,” Lio finally says, as loftily as he can. 

“You drive a hard bargain,” Galo sighs, but then he grins crookedly and slings one arm across Lio’s shoulders, jostling him closer. “But all right, noodles it is! The spiciest noodles we can find!”

Lio affects a long-suffering sigh, but he doesn’t draw away. “The spiciest we can find,” he agrees. 

* * *

Lio is ten years old and hanging the laundry, and the days have been long and dusty, and even the rocks where the lizards congregate seem to be singed by the sun. Many things on the horizon shimmer in the heat, so that even the mountains may be inventions or dreams; a shivering, diaphanous almost-blue. 

_Burn it_ , the voice whispers in his blood. _Let me burn it._

“No,” Lio says angrily to the earth, fastening a clothespin to the line. “That would destroy it. Don’t you see?” 

_Not destroy_ , the little flame says. _Only change its shape._

“You can’t trick me,” Lio mutters, hurrying down the line to hang the tablecloth and be done with it, so that he can ride far out into the desert, where there’s nothing worth burning. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not stupid. If you want to burn things, go somewhere else.”

A sensation darts up his back like a match being struck, defiant. In his hand, one of the napkins erupts in fantastic, uncanny flames, pink and turquoise. He drops it with a shout.

He tries to stamp out the fire, but the force seems to only make it grow. Only when the napkin has burned to ash does it go out.

Lio stands panting at its remains, winded like he’s just run uphill, and staggers for a second, overwhelmed by a brilliant and alive feeling that roars in his every atom, renaming them each to each. 

“Don’t do that!” he gasps. 

_Why?_

“Because things—” Lio struggles for the words, and even the ones he finds seem to fall short of something. “Things have a right to exist.”

_All things?_

“Most things. Some things.”

The little flame writhes thoughtfully in Lio’s ribcage. This may be the first time that it has listened. 

_Then do I have a right to exist?_

Shakily, Lio bends down to pick up the garments that have spilled from the laundry hamper. He grits his teeth to steady himself. 

“You’re not a thing.”

_Then what am I?_

“You think I know?” he snaps. “You’re just a voice. You’re not even real.”

 _Not real?_ It laps sadly at his bones. 

“If you’re real, then tell me what you are,” Lio says, and for a moment some imperious power possesses his voice, a power he does not recognize. “Tell me right now.”

The little flame is quiet for a long time, long enough that Lio finishes hanging the laundry, long enough that the sun has begun to sink beyond the distant mountains. 

_In your world_ , it says at last, in a whisper, or what must be a whisper, _we are called Promare. We live on a great star that is made up of all of us, burning and being. It is very far away._

Lio repeats this word to himself once, twice. “So you’re a star?” 

_No. I am a Promare._

Lio wanders to the edge of the yard, by the juniper, and smells the coming rain. “What’s a Promare?” 

_It is me._

“I _know_ that,” Lio groans, covering his face with both hands. “But—I mean—why are you here? What do you want?” 

It seems to consider these questions carefully, inspecting them from all angles. 

_I am here because you called me_ , it replies, and then, after further deliberation, _I do not know what I want. To burn. To be. As I have always burned and been._

* * *

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Remi says, brandishing a drooping slice of pizza across the table, “but are you depressed? It’s all right if you’re depressed, you know.” 

It takes Lio a second to realize that he’s the one being spoken to, so engrossed is he in gazing at the untouched salad on his plate, listening to the dim shapes the voices of the others make as they speak and laugh and eat around him. When he does, he lifts his head slowly and blinks at Remi, who’s leaning forward on his elbows and fixing him with a steady, analytical stare through his glasses. 

“ _Remi_ ,” Aina hisses, and hits him with a napkin. 

Remi yelps in a way that far exceeds the force of the blow, clutching his arm. 

“Huh?” Galo asks, breaking off from his heated conversation about video game controllers with Lucia. He glances to each occupant of the table in turn, and at Lio a few extra times. “Who’s depressed?” 

“You’ve got no tact, man,” Varys grunts through a mouthful, his jaw set gravely. “Let the little man open up to us in his own time.” 

“It’s not a question of _tact_ ,” Remi says, and Aina hits him again. “Ow!” He rubs his shoulder. “I was just worried! I’m not allowed to be worried? Boss, I’m not allowed to be worried?” 

He whirls on Ignis, who’s sitting between Lucia and Varys with his arms folded and his face as inscrutable as ever. 

He says, “Hrm.” 

“I’m not depressed,” Lio mutters. He picks up his fork to nudge disinterestedly at an artichoke heart, like someone who is not depressed might. 

Remi adjusts his glasses, peering at Lio through the lenses. “Are you sure?” 

Lio maneuvers his fork into a fist and levels it at Remi like a switchblade, narrowing his eyes to slits. “Are you deaf?” 

This seems sufficient for everyone—especially Lucia, going by the impish laugh—and the scattered conversations resume their tempo, moving gradually away from Lio like a sea parting. He doesn’t eat his salad. 

“Are you coming back to HQ?” Aina asks him afterwards, with some measure of gentle caution, tucking her hands behind her back. She’s leaning a little bit sideways to push into his field of vision. 

Ahead of them, the others are walking back to HQ in a cluster, enthusiastically teasing Galo about something—Lio catches the word _shirt_. Lio’s eyes stick to Galo’s back, the faint slopes of his shoulder blades through his jacket, all of the muscle and tissue he can’t see. 

“Why would I do that?” he asks, not harshly. “It’s not like I’ve accepted the job, you know.” 

Aina’s eyes stray to the sidewalk. “I know,” she says. “But we always like having you around.” 

As the leader of Mad Burnish, by nothing more than happenstance and the right fistful of words, Lio has grown somewhat accustomed to the idea that he has a charisma he cannot see; that people do want him, in spite of everything, for better or worse. Nonetheless, the fact that the people of Burning Rescue continue to extend branches to him, and ropes, and hands, has him at a loss. He’d done nothing, had he, but make their work more grueling—not that he hadn’t done it for a just cause. Whatever other doubts he might have, that isn’t one of them. 

He glances over the bridge of his nose at Aina, who is clearly walking slower than her preferred speed to keep pace with him; Aina, whose scarf is huge and bright blue, a summer sky blue, a blue’s blue; Aina, who swings her legs a little when she takes a step, and has her neck craned skyward, and wears smiles like medals of valor.

“I don’t do much,” he murmurs, closing his cold hands into fists in his coat pockets. 

What he really means is, _I am a Burnish no more. I walk slowly._ He doubts that Aina, despite her good intentions, hears these things.

“Do much?” Aina tilts her head until her ponytail tickles her shoulder. “You think _we_ do anything these days?” 

Lio lets out a small and uncertain laugh. He often forgets how little the alarms in the FDPP go off anymore, now that the Burnish have been reduced to a myth; he often forgets how quiet the city has become, now that he and his cousins aren’t fighting tooth and claw against it, now that its ruins are empty lots and its cinders real estate projects. Now that the Promare have abandoned them. 

“Sorry,” Aina says hurriedly, and waves both hands, shakes her head. “I didn’t mean for that to sound—um—passive-aggressive. I just mean… it’s been quiet. And that’s good. Really good! But… we never had quiet before. So we’re all kind of…” She flails her hands around her head and makes a confused noise, a sort of _waaah_. “You know?” 

It surprises him, but Lio does know. His little Promare would have liked this—this funny gesture, this wailing noise—and it hurts him to know that. He bites his tongue and ducks his head into his coat collar. 

“I’d just make it more quiet,” he says, and picks up his pace, striding ahead until Aina vanishes from his periphery. “See you.” 

Aina wastes no time before she calls to his back, far more loudly than she needs to, “See you!” Like she’s going to hold him to it. 

Lio passes his park on the way to the subway station. The stairs are frosted over, glistening in the dull, hard light of the afternoon. He does not climb them. 

* * *

Lio is four, and he has lived in the desert for as long as he can remember. All that he has ever known are the house with the tin roof and the saguaro in the yard and the taste of his mother’s _daktyla_ and the fires that his father builds with broken pallets. Lio is four and the first expression that he memorizes is the one on his mother’s face when his father lights a fire, hungry and mournful, obscured by so many restless shadows. 

“Oh, Lio,” his mother says, her hand steady at his shoulder. “My Lio, my little hope, my ember. What will keep you warm when I am gone?” 

Lio asks, “Where are you going?” 

His mother’s face is hard to make out in the twilight. She smells of smoke and of honey. Lio wonders and wonders again how they came to the desert, to their little hut on the edge of the umber world, to the kit foxes and the cottontails and the creosote and the stars. 

“That’s for another time,” she tells him. “Another story. One I don’t yet know.” She pulls him closer, and Lio closes his eyes, burying his face in the side of her jeans. “Come inside, now, where there’s light. Come inside.” 

* * *

He wakes up in a sweat—sitting up so fast that the sheets are thrown from his legs—about to scream. 

His apartment is a cold, pervasive kind of dark; only the light from the moon makes it in, and even that does so with some effort, a strand between the blinds. In that dark, Lio waits for his breath to find itself again, stuttering painfully through his chest. 

He unclenches his hand from the top sheet, staring down at it until his eyes adjust. It has a shadowed, unfamiliar shape. 

“Come,” he whispers. “Come on.” 

He hears nothing—nothing but the traffic of the city, and some music from the floor above, and the jagged beating of his heart. Once the adrenaline tapers off, the cold comes, twofold. 

He turns his shivering head to the cell phone on his bedside table, a sleek black thing that Lucia had shoved into his hands at the summer’s end. He reaches for it before he can second-guess it, scrolling with one stiff thumb through the contacts. Ardebit, A; Ardebit, H. Gueira. Thymos. 

He looks at that name, in its plain script, for a long time, gently tapping the screen when the light dims. 

In the end, he crawls out of bed with the comforter wrapped around him and pads silently into the living room, where the walls are bare, where the couch is ugly. He crouches down in front of the space heater, turning it up to its maximum intensity with one shaking hand, and at last falls asleep curled up on the floor beside it, warm and alone, alone and warm. 

* * *

“Lio Fotia,” Heris Ardebit says, more breath than voice, holding a clipboard fast to her chest with one hand as if it keeps her heart beating. “To what do I—I mean—how are you?” 

Lio scoffs softly against his teeth. Heris’s laboratory is smaller now, with great chunks of the walls and wires torn out as if by teeth; Lio has not visited it since the disaster. According to Aina, government workers had offered many times to clear the wreckage, repair the damage, but Heris had insisted that they stay; _as a reminder_ , she had said. _We need to remember, each and every day._

Lio isn’t sure that’s good enough, but it’s something. 

“I came to ask you something,” he murmurs, and nothing more. 

Heris’s grip on the clipboard loosens by a fraction, and after a moment she collects herself, gives him a nod. She has clever eyes, righteous eyes. Eyes like Aina’s. 

“Of course,” she says, and lifts her arm to gesture down the hallway. “We can talk in the observation room.” 

The observation room doesn’t observe much of anything anymore, save for a cavern half-covered in roots and the blackened skeleton of the warp gate. When he follows Heris inside, it’s empty; the lighting is dim, and red, and the main window has been shattered; there are still flecks of glass along the rim of the floor. 

Lio crosses that floor until he’s nearly flush with the remaining pane, and lifts his hand to lay his palm on the surface, which is covered in a film of dust. 

“What can I do for you?” Heris asks, like she truly yearns for the answer. 

Lio draws in a breath into his hollow chest. He slackens his arm until his fingertips slip down the glass. 

“I want to know,” he says, “if you can—if I can talk to them again.” 

Heris falters. “I’m sorry?” 

Lio bows his head to the floor. “I can’t—stand it. The quiet. I need to hear them again. Just once.” 

Heris is silent, then, in a way that Lio knows means she’s understood him. It’s a condolence, almost; some preemptive sympathy card that makes Lio want to spit in anger. 

“Please,” he says instead, pitiful even to his own ears. “Please.” 

Heris’s quiet stretches itself until it’s nearly translucent. Finally she says, in a low, remorseful whisper, “You know I can’t.” 

Lio had feared this answer—anticipated it, in so many forms and cadences—but it still has a blast radius. It still shatters something. In all ways except physical, it sends him to the floor. 

“The gate has been closed, Lio,” she goes on. “There’s no way to reopen it—and even if there were, I wouldn’t do it. Please understand.” 

“I don’t,” Lio chokes out, and as he realizes how true it is his voice rises, breaks. “I don’t understand.” 

Its echoes reach the broken window, the dead warp gate, the countless pods just like the one in which his dreams still trap him, spinning, burning, crying out into a vast and hateful silence. He clutches his head and falls to his knees, right there, in front of Heris Ardebit. 

“Lio,” she says, and starts to move toward him. 

“Leave me be!” he roars, or tries to, but his voice is small and hoarse, and touches nothing. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” 

Heris does not speak again for so long that Lio wonders if she’s heeded the plea, but then he hears an exhale, and a movement of fabric, and then Heris is crouched beside him with her hands on her knees, breathing out long and heavy through her nose. 

“Lio,” she whispers. “Just because we can’t see things doesn’t mean they aren’t there. We created microscopes, telescopes—things that show us snow crystals… pollen grains… stellar remnants—all because we knew that there was more than what our eyes gave us. You can’t hear them anymore, but they aren’t gone. Just because that part of you is no longer visible doesn’t—”

Then she closes her mouth, until it’s nothing more than a sore, thin line. As though it is the culmination of everything, she tells him, “You remember.”

* * *

Lio is sixteen and his house is burning. The flames are pink and incandescent, like his— _like his_ , he thinks, shivering and sick behind the saguaro with one hand over his mouth to keep his breathing quiet—and against the flames he can make out three hulking silhouettes in dark mech suits on which the words _FREEZE FORCE_ are painted, harsh and white. Lio is sixteen and his house is burning and he can’t see his parents. 

“They had a kid, didn’t they?” says one of the silhouettes, hefting a Foresight freeze gun over its shoulder. “Was it in there?” 

“Who knows. She went off as soon as we busted down the door. If it was, it’s gonna be a pile of ash in a minute.”

“Who’d’ve guessed the old Mad Burnish leader would be holed up all the way out here? Shit. Wouldn’t be me.” 

_Can I?_ Lio’s little flame whispers, restless and wounded in the core of him, seeming to stretch itself hungrily toward the blaze. _Can I, can I, can I?_

Lio swallows a breath to keep the vomit in, wrenching his eyes shut until muffled echoes of light bruise his vision. Far beneath the waxing desert moon, surrounded by the stench of juniper and burning flesh, a rage erodes the fear until there is no fear left to claim him.

Lio steps out from behind the saguaro—his saguaro—and his body releases a scream. He ignites before they even turn their heads. 

* * *

“Leaving?” Lio whispers. 

The ambient noise of the diner almost buries it, but he can tell by the winces on Meis and Gueria’s faces that they hear it. They’re all at a booth by the window, with Gueira at Lio’s side and Meis facing them and three cheeseburgers between them, untouched. 

“We can’t stay here, Boss,” Gueira says, wiping at his nose with the back of his hand. “It just don’t feel right.” 

Lio’s mind hooks onto the word _leaving, leaving_. 

“We won’t be far,” Meis adds. “The desert, maybe. Close enough for you to call us, if you need to.” 

“That’s right.” Gueira nods firmly. “We’ll answer you for anything, Boss! To the end!” 

“Of course,” Meis says, “you could come with us.” 

Lio lifts his head from his lap, where he has been staring blankly at his hands, and looks at each of his familiar companions in turn. He remembers his first night with Mad Burnish—his first night in the garish, unforgiving city—how Gueira had given him a little plastic bottle of water, how Meis had ruffled his hair. They seem different now than they had then, though not different in the way that Lio sees in his mirror; something endures, sustains itself, a molten thing changing shape. 

They’ll be happy in the desert, he thinks, and is so sure of it that it feels like a knife in his neck. 

“Maybe this ain’t right for you either,” Gueira is saying quietly when Lio returns to himself. “You know? I know you and Thymos have a whole, uh, thing, but…”

Lio’s eyes flash to him. “ _Thing_?” 

Gueira yelps and throws his hands up as if to pacify a tiger. “Y-You know what I mean! That you both went through a lot together, you know? A lot of that stuff, with Foresight. So if he’s the reason you’re staying, that ain’t bad or anything… but…”

“Boss,” Meis interjects, steadying his grave gaze on Lio across the table, “you seem unhappy.”

Lio waits for that to settle itself into the emptiness that follows him everywhere, the emptiness that swallows all good and real things whole. He gazes at the unappetizing golden French fries, the cold burger, the separate stack of wilted lettuce and red onion and a slice of tomato, pale and underripe.

“Unhappy?” he whispers. Meis and Gueira glance at each other, but don’t say anything. He draws in a shaky breath and lets it out, and pushes his plate away. 

“Don’t you…” he asks them, as evenly as he can, “miss yours?”

They don’t ask for any clarification. Immediately, Meis answers, “All the time.”

“Every morning, Boss,” Gueira adds in a low voice. He bows his head to the table, the set of his jaw tense and somber. “That’s why we’re leavin’.”

The first response that flares in Lio’s mind is this: _That’s why I’m staying_. But that wouldn’t make any sense, would it? 

His head hurts. 

“Don’t worry about me,” he tells them, and manages to pull together a smile, the kind of smile that would have made them proud a half a year ago. “Just take care of yourselves.”

“We will,” Meis says, as Gueira breaks down into messy tears. “We will, Boss.”

* * *

Lio’s phone lights up on his bedside table on a sleeting Friday afternoon with a message from Ardebit, A. _Drinks at The Intermission at 7 tonight. Just you and me. Don’t be late!_ Then a huffing emoji and a flexing arm emoji. Lio doesn’t type a reply, but at six o’clock he bundles up in his shirt, two sweaters, and wool coat and marches to the subway station. 

The Intermission is a hip bar near Aina’s place, full of noise. Lio has gone only once before, with her and Galo, the evening after Kray Foresight’s ark had run aground; they had been exhausted, and furious, and had gotten exhaustedly, furiously drunk. 

It’s more crowded now than it had been then, but Lio still finds Aina without much trouble, on account of the fact that she starts waving enthusiastically at him from a table the moment he walks in the door. 

She’s in a yellow parka and a chunky white cable-knit sweater, and her nose and cheeks are pink. Her hair is tied up in a bun.

“You’re early!” she exclaims, as if nothing delights her more. 

Lio takes the stool across from her, keeping his coat buttoned. “The train was fast.” 

Aina beams. “I’m glad you came. How is everything?” 

Lio doesn’t think he’ll be in the right space to answer that question until he’s had a not-insignificant amount of alcohol. 

“Fine,” he lies, sliding over the laminated cocktail menu with two gloved fingers. He scans the litany of stupid, pretentious names. “What do you recommend?” 

Aina holds aloft her stout glass of something bright pink with a lime in it. “Whatever this is.” 

So Lio orders one. It tastes like watermelon if watermelon could give you bronchitis. He orders another.

“Good, right?” Aina asks, her voice a little louder and freer now. 

“I hate my apartment,” announces Lio. 

It feels like the kind of thing that should halt everything else—the conversations, the laughing—but it doesn’t. Under the music and the clamoring voices, Aina is probably the only one who hears it. 

“Oh,” she says after a second, lowering her half-empty glass onto the table. “Oh. Okay. What’s wrong with it?” 

Lio chews at the inside of his cheek, eyes fixed on a scratch in the wood, from a blade or a key. His arms feel heavy in a vaguely pleasant way, and his muscles not so knotted up. 

“It’s too quiet,” he settles for saying. “And dark and empty and—big.” 

“Oh,” Aina says again. “Bigger than you know what to do with, huh?” 

Lio looks up at her with a startled comprehension. She’s giving him a sad, gentle smile, with both of her hands closed lightly around her glass. 

“I told Galo we should’ve taken it easy,” she says. “Look, Lio, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to live there. Really. We can help you find a better place.” 

Lio thinks on what a better place might be: a mountaintop, a seaside culvert, a white stone bench; a house with a tin roof, kept company by a saguaro. He knows he can’t make Aina, or any of them, understand. It chews at him like a hunger, or maybe like a loneliness. Maybe, Lio thinks, in the quiet that radiates out from the notch behind his lungs like an expanding hole, this is loneliness. 

“I’m not going back there tonight,” he mumbles; the words have lost their vital edges, muddled into a slurry. “I’m not.” 

“Don’t,” Aina tells him with conviction. 

“You know,” he goes on, pressing his thumb to the rim of his glass, “Gueira and Meis are leaving.” 

Aina slowly nods, eyes wandering half-lidded to her lap. 

“I’m sorry,” she says as if she means it. “Are you going to leave, too?” 

“I don’t know,” Lio says. He hunches over the table, closing his empty hands into fists. “I should. I shouldn’t stay here. I hate being in his city—in Kray Foresight’s beautiful city.” He spits out the word _beautiful_ with all of the vitriol his mouth has learned. “But…” 

“But?” 

“It would be lonely,” Lio confesses. The moment it’s out of him, his body seems to stutter around it, dropping a heavy chain. “I don’t want… to be lonely like that. Anymore.” 

Aina watches him intently, so much so that Lio wonders if she’s seen clear through to his skeleton. Presently she says, “Call Galo.” 

Lio frowns at her. “What?” 

“Call Galo,” she repeats. “I’m serious. He’d want to help, if he knew.” 

“I’m not going to call Galo,” Lio snaps. “It’s a Friday night. Isn’t he working?” 

Aina shakes her head. “He swapped shifts with Varys. He’s working Sunday.” 

Lio’s heart aches, and aches. “I’m not going to call him.” 

Aina huffs and slumps back in the chair, and the table shakes when her knee knocks briefly into it. 

The truth of it is that Lio has found himself on the brink of calling Galo too many times. The truth of it is that no matter what Lio wants, or thinks that he wants in the dark, Galo has already rescued him once, and that had been enough—and to ask for more would be selfishness, the kind of greed that would ruin him. 

“Do you love him?” he asks, because it pins all the other questions under it.

Aina lets out a sound alarmingly close to a squeak and goes a vibrant shade of red from the neck up. 

“No!” she blurts out, and then collects herself. “No. I mean, I did—I do—but not like that… anymore. It’s… hard to explain…” 

She inhales until it arches her spine, and then lets it out again, slouching comfortably forward. She chews one side of her lip contemplatively, her eyebrows furrowed, her forehead dented. 

“I think Galo’s easy to love,” she finally says, embarrassed. “You know what I mean?” 

Lio thinks of Galo—the warmth of his hands, the indominatable smile—the stupid, boundless goodness of him—Galo’s mouth on his mouth, the weight, the slant, the feeling. Galo’s flame, catching in his throat.

He tips his glass back and drains it. The last of the pink drink slips syrupy down to his middle. 

“Yeah,” he says, hoarse with the truth of it. “Yes. I know what you mean.” 

* * *

“Oh, Lio!” Galo exclaims after answering his phone on the first ring. “You’re up late!” 

Lio breathes out until it mists into the night. The subway platform is practically deserted. He and Aina had parted ways in front of the bar only a few minutes ago, with Aina pulling him in at the last minute for a hug, her little arms firm around his shoulders. 

_You don’t have to be alone, Lio_ , she’d told him. _You rescued us, too, you know._

Now he adjusts his phone at his ear, bowing his head into his scarf, and searches for what to say. As ever, Galo gets there first. 

“Everything okay?” he asks, suddenly serious. 

Lio laughs in spite of himself. “Not really.” 

There’s a sudden noise like Galo’s just stood up very quickly. “You were gettin’ drinks with Aina, right? Are you still there? I’ll come—”

“No, I mean, I’m fine,” Lio softly interjects. “I mean, I’m all right. Physically. But…” 

Galo exhales with an obvious relief. “Oh, good. Good! So, uh… where do you want me to meet up with you, then?” 

“Meet up?” Lio repeats. “Like… right now?” 

“Well yeah,” Galo says, sounding impatient. “You said something’s botherin’ you, right? I’m not gonna let you go it alone.” 

He puts such dire weight on the word _alone_ , like it’s some kind of terminal disease. Lio lifts a hand to his face, combing his fingers through some of his hair, and starts laughing. 

It’s a surprised, stuttering thing, but once it froths up in his chest, it doesn’t stop. It rings out across the empty platform, down the tunnel, up into the city that he wants so desperately to hate—up into the city where Galo is, and Aina is, and the lone swan is; up into the city of parks, and power lines, and pain. 

“Sorry,” he manages to stammer, aware only then that the laughing has deteriorated into crying, and that his eyes are burning with a heat beyond his control. “Sorry. I just—don’t worry about it. All right? I’ll come to you.” 

“You sure? You know how to get here?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah,” Galo says, marveling a little. “You probably will.” 

And Lio isn’t sure how to hold that, so he tells him, “See you soon,” and lingers on the line for an unneeded moment before hanging up and searching for directions.

* * *

Galo’s place is on the other side of town, two floors above a convenience store. It’s the first time that Lio’s been there. His hand hesitates over the door before he sucks in a breath and knocks. 

He’s scarcely lifted his knuckles away when the door swings open, and Galo appears in the empty space with one hand on the doorknob and the other braced against the jamb, wearing sweatpants and a black t-shirt. Over his shoulder, all of the lights are on. When his eyes land on Lio’s face, they visibly brighten, but he doesn’t smile. 

“You made it!” he says. 

In this light—in the doorway—he is utterly spectacular. 

Lio manages to make a sour face. “Of course I did.” 

At that, Galo does smile, a broad grin that fills up his whole face. 

“Of course you did,” he parrots, and steps aside. “C’mon in! I turned on all the heaters.” 

Sure enough, the inside of the apartment is toasty. Lio’s eyes rove over the decor as he sheds his coat. Movie posters, mostly, and a _matoi_ replica in pristine condition mounted on a stand in the corner. There’s a flatscreen TV against the right wall and a red leather loveseat that looks like it’s seen better days against the left. There’s an empty pizza box on the coffee table and a firefighter’s jacket hanging from one hook on the wooden Coca Cola coat rack by the front door. 

It smells like Galo’s laundry soap. Lio draws in a breath through his nose as he crouches down to untie his shoes. 

“Make yourself at home,” Galo tells him, shutting the door behind him and rushing into the kitchen. “You want Ramune? I got Ramune.” 

“I want to sleep,” Lio says, folding his coat over one arm. 

Galo is quiet in a way that seems to trip over itself. 

“Oh,” he finally says. “Okay. I have a couch…” 

Lio tries to keep his heart out of his throat with little success. “Not the couch,” he says, barely audible. 

He doesn’t dare turn around. He isn’t sure his body has the strength to do much more than hold itself up. Galo’s silence unfolds, and Lio waits for what he will find at the end of it. 

“The floor?” Galo finally asks, with a note of alarm. 

Lio slaps a hand over his face. 

“Do you have a _bed_?” he asks through gritted teeth. 

“Sure I have a _bed_ ,” Galo retorts like he’s indignant that Lio would think otherwise. “But it’s not like—” Then he pauses. “ _Ohhhhhh_.” 

Lio sighs and finally cranes his neck. Galo is still standing on the threshold to the kitchen, his face a fierce, watermelon-pink. 

“You—wanna sleep—in my bed?” he asks, his mouth crumpling with either excitement or terror or both. 

Lio nods, gaze wandering to the floor. “If you don’t mind.” 

“No!” Galo yelps. “I totally don’t mind!” He clears his throat, pointing in turn to the bedroom doorway, Lio, and then himself. “Do you… want me… to uh, also be… in the bed?” 

Lio considers this one. 

“If you don’t mind,” he says to the floor. 

When he cautiously lifts his eyes to Galo’s again, he finds them steady, bright, and clear. Lio feels, in that moment, that Galo must see everything that he is, and everything that he has ever been. He’s felt this before, on a rooftop, surrounded by smoke and embers, with a blade in his hand; it hadn’t scared him then, either. Not even a little bit. 

Galo looks at him a moment longer, with all of the lights on, withholding nothing. Then he crosses the room, beckoning to Lio to follow him with one hand and an easy smile. 

Galo’s bed is pretty narrow, and most of it is covered with a layer of rumpled clothes and books that he pushes hurriedly to the floor with one sweep of his arm. His bedroom window is across the street from a karaoke bar with a blinking neon sign that casts flashes of lurid color onto the walls, split by the narrow meeting rails—blue, then pink; blue, then pink. 

Galo nods to the mattress, and Lio hesitates a second before stepping past him, curling and uncurling his fingers, and clambering onto it with his clothes and socks still on, stretching out a little stiffly at the edge nearest the wall. 

If the apartment had smelled like Galo, this is the center of it, familiar and indescribable. Lio closes his eyes, lifting his head away from the pillow to maneuver his hair away from his cheek. 

Beside him, at his back, the mattress sags and bounces for a moment; when Galo stretches out face-up next to Lio, making no contact between their bodies in a way that can’t be accidental, he sighs briskly, fidgeting around until he’s comfortable. Lio can’t see him, but he can feel the warmth of him in the empty space between them, so palpable that it could be a touch. 

Slowly, unspeaking, Lio rolls over, until he’s facing Galo’s side—until his forehead settles against Galo’s shoulder. He closes his eyes, breathes out. 

Galo is still for only an instant, small enough to fit a heartbeat in. Then he reaches over with one arm, and settles it across Lio’s middle, and pulls him closer. 

Lio blinks through wide eyes when his face presses against Galo’s chest, which is firmer than he expects it to be. The weight of Galo’s arm at his ribs is restrained, poised to lift away at any moment, still not certain of itself. 

To lend it certainty, Lio closes one set of fingers into the front of Galo’s shirt, and closes his eyes, and breathes in deep. 

“Lio,” Galo says hoarsely. “Lio,” he repeats, stronger now, “what—I mean—is there, y’know—anything I can do?” 

Lio, pleasantly adrift in the scent and shape of him, takes a while to register the question, and longer still to find its answer. He relaxes into Galo’s hold, and after a moment pulls his head back an inch, so that he can look at him. 

“Just talk,” he whispers, hoping that it doesn’t sound as stupid as it feels. “Talk about anything.” 

“Really?” Galo blinks, his face half-lit by uncanny pink. “Anything?”

Lio nods wordlessly. What he can’t say is that the silence that his little flame had left him with might swallow him whole. What he can’t say is that the only thing that feels real anymore, or like home, or like a force that could drive a vital organ, is the sound of Galo’s voice. 

“Okay,” Galo murmurs, shifting his head on the pillow to gaze contemplatively out the window. His eyes catch the light, rendered celestial bodies. “Talk about anything, huh… anything…” 

After a while, he says, “Y’know way back in the day they used to call fires _edo no hana_?” 

“ _Edo no hana_?” Lio repeats, frowning. 

“Mm!” Galo nods eagerly. “The flowers of Edo! Y’see, on a certain Far East island, there was this old city that was all made up of bamboo and straw, and the houses were so close together you couldn’t even sneeze without endin’ up in your neighbor’s living room. So when fires started, they’d take out a whole block in half a second. Real pain for the firefighters—and for the people livin’ there, too. But it happened so often, I guess, that people started callin’ ’em this special name, like it was kinda—an in-joke, y’know? They started callin’ ’em _edo no hana_.” 

“ _Edo no hana_ ,” Lio repeats sleepily. 

“Yeah,” Galo says, and adjusts his arm, his head settling comfortably onto the pillow they’re sharing. He closes his eyes and lets out a contented sigh. “Ain’t that kind of amazing?” 

Lio yawns. His eyes start to slip closed. “Amazing.” 

“Amazing,” Galo repeats softly, and his arm tightens around Lio by an increment. “And d’you know what else…” 

Lio finds himself falling asleep easily, listening to the stable course of Galo’s voice in the dark. The meaning of the words matters less than the shape of them, the cadence, the places where they grow faint or ardent. He dreams about the stars in the desert. He dreams about the things that he remembers.

* * *

He’s jostled awake the next morning before the sun has even come up, and the first thing that he sees is Galo’s energetic, grinning face. 

“What the _hell_ ,” he groans, but Galo grabs him by the wrist and hoists him out of bed. 

“We’re goin’ for a ride!” he announces as he leads Lio to the entryway. “Get your shoes on! C’mon, or the sun’s gonna beat us!”

Leave it to Galo Thymos to start his mornings by racing the sun. Lio groans again, blearily tugging on his shoes without tying them. 

He straggles behind Galo down two flights of stairs and onto the sidewalk. Galo’s street is deserted. The traffic of Promepolis, which so often chokes the streets at all daylight hours, is nowhere to be seen. At the end of the block, a traffic light turns green for nothing, sending a glistening strip of light onto the icy street. 

Lio’s teeth start chattering. He’d forgotten his coat. Before he can so much as turn around to go back for it, Galo has shucked his jacket and draped it over Lio’s shoulders. 

“Don’t worry, I don’t get cold,” he says confidently, clapping Lio on the back with enough force to empty his lungs. “Follow me.” 

He leads Lio two blocks south and stops in front of a parked motorcycle. Lio dimly recognizes it, though he’s seen a lot more of Aina’s. Only then does he notice the two helmets tucked under Galo’s now-bare arms. 

Galo tosses one to him, which Lio catches in both hands, and then pops the other over his head. He clambers onto the bike and turns the engine over a couple of times, waiting for it to warm up. 

“Get on!” he says when Lio doesn’t. 

Lio lowers himself onto the back of the seat warily, encircling Galo’s waist with both arms.

“Hold on tight,” Galo tells him, and the words pinch at Lio’s stomach until a heat expands from the spot, seeps into his limbs. 

Galo goes tearing down the streets on the bike at such a high velocity that Lio has to dig his fingers into the front of Galo’s shirt to keep from being flung off. Eventually, the smog and asphalt smells of the city give way to something crisper, dirt and mountain pine. 

Lio turns his head to the roadside to see trees—great towering evergreens, their roots kept company by little shrubs and ivy. A dense snow has covered most of them, the branches bowing beneath its weight. Here and there Lio can see animal tracks, little remnants of a fox or deer. The road slopes—they’re going downhill. 

Eventually Galo coasts the bike to a stop by the side of a familiar lake. He waits for Lio to disembark first, then follows. 

Lio lifts the helmet from his head, shaking out his hair, which is a little stuck to his forehead. The air is freezing on his face, but Galo’s jacket is still comfortably warm. 

Galo sets his hands on his hips, smiling out at the valley. The sun will rise soon. They’d beaten it after all. 

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Galo says to the morning. 

“Don’t strain yourself.” 

“Very funny,” Galo grumbles, jutting out his chin. He thinks for a moment, then says, with some of his smile still remaining, “You’re thinkin’ about leavin’, aren’t you?” 

Lio turns his head toward him, floundering. Galo doesn’t look especially sad about it—something in his expression, in the slant of his shoulders, has already accepted a choice that Lio hasn’t even made yet—but his voice is a little deeper, more pensive. Lio almost says, _That’s the problem. I can’t leave you._

“I think I want to stay,” he hears a voice that might be his answer. “I don’t know. But it’s—I just—” He struggles for the right way to say it as he would for air underwater. “I can’t just forget.” 

Galo surprises him, then. He says, “I know.” 

The rest comes like a parapet giving way, like a wave smashing against a cliff face in a storm: Lio bites his cheek and goes on, “I can’t forget. Not what we endured, or what that city’s built on—not the Promare. Not what we were, and still are, even though everyone acts like we aren’t. I can’t.” A shapeless pain needles through his chest, straight to the heart. “The world was only kind to us when it didn’t have a choice.”

Galo says again, darkly, shamefully, “I know.” 

“Why would I want to stay?” Lio murmurs, half to himself, even though he already knows the answer. 

Galo is quiet for a long, long time. Lio watches the tips of the mountains across the lake turn gold from the coming sun. Birds start to wake in the trees, communing and continuing. 

Before he knows it, it will be spring. 

“Remember for ’em, then,” Galo says at last. “Be their… spokesperson, y’know?” 

“I was their spokesperson for a long time,” Lio replies, surprised by how dully his voice comes out of him. “And what good can I even do them now? Now that I’m…” 

He trails off, but he doubts Galo has to strain to hear the word. 

“I think when a lotta people have somethin’ to say,” Galo muses after a moment, “sometimes one voice for all of ’em is best, y’know? Especially when it’s a good voice—a voice that’ll look out for them. A voice that remembers. And your voice has always been good for that. For a lotta things.” 

Lio blinks up at him, a little bewildered. “It has?” 

Galo nods stoutly. 

“I like your voice, Lio,” he says in a low murmur. “I like the stuff you say… and I like the way it sounds.” 

_Easy to love_. It’s true, Lio thinks, gaping at Galo’s blushing face in the sunrise. It fills him up.

He grasps a few little words again, from wherever they have drifted to. 

“Yours isn’t too bad, either.” 

“Oh?” Galo whirls on him, grinning with all of his teeth, like a dog that’s just been told it’s time for a walk. “You think so? Even when I talk about _matoi_?” 

“Except when you talk about _matoi_.” 

“Aw, what!” Galo yelps, crestfallen. “That’s cold!”

Lio laughs before he can hope or ask for it, laying a hand across his stomach and doubling over. Galo watches him with no shortage of wonder on his face. When Lio straightens up again, he comes to a decision. He comes to a decision about Galo Thymos. 

“I’m going to kiss you,” he says. “All right?” 

Galo has given more thought to the most ridiculous of his impulses than he does to Lio’s question. Within a second, within a breath, he nods vigorously and says, “All right.” 

Lio frames Galo’s face in his numb hands and swings up onto the balls of his feet, pressing his chapped lips to Galo’s lips, which are not chapped, which are summer-warm, desert-warm, and taste like coffee. 

When he draws away, he sees that Galo had closed his eyes, and his breath hitches when they flutter open again, searching Lio’s face for something to keep. 

“You know,” he whispers, and then swallows, silently; his throat shifts to accommodate it. His hands settle onto Lio’s hips. “You know I’ll be here for you. Wherever you go. You know that, yeah? You know that.” 

Lio gazes up at Galo’s face—that foolish, remarkable face—that face like the desert sky. “Wherever I go?”

Galo, whose touch remains, nods his head three times.

He says to Lio, “Anywhere.” 

* * *

Lio is four, and in his mother’s hand there is a flame. It casts mystical splashes of rosy light onto the walls of the dark kitchen, refracting off of the pots and the faucet and the windowpanes. Lio thinks that he can hear it giggle and whisper, in a small, small voice. 

Amazed and frozen in the doorway, he whispers, “ _Mána_ , what’s that?” 

His mother looks up swiftly, and her flame sputters like a candle by an open window, but does not go out. Lio is too young, maybe, to see the spasm of fear on her face before she schools it into something else, something inviting, something that he knows. He steps hesitantly, curiously closer. 

She crouches down to his height, holding the hand with the flame in it between them. Lio watches the shapes that it makes, open-mouthed, in awe. It’s beautiful. More beautiful than all the stars put together. 

“What is it?” he asks again. 

His mother scoots a little closer to him, bending her head over the flame until the crown of it brushes his. 

“Love, Lio,” she says, and that is the word that Lio will remember. “This is love. You see? It glows.” 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> How romantic is the line _so spend some time with me / I really like your company_? How romantic is that?! Lio likes his company!!! Love is real.
> 
> Special thanks to a humble chook (AO3 user tookumade) for beta-ing and Lily (AO3 user astrid_fischer) for screaming. <3
> 
> Now that reveals are up, you can come say hi to me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/brells_)!


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